Bottom line: their broker communication was the single feature that actually cut our deadhead miles and headaches. They assign a dedicated rep who chases confirmations and rate tweaks relentlessly - we started getting commitments in hours instead of waiting a day or two for a callback. I manage a 25-truck fleet in the Midwest, and that tighter broker follow-up translated into real utilization gains; drivers spent less time parked on vague promises and more time moving freight. One time a broker tried to wiggle out of a layover payment and their rep had it resolved by mid-morning, avoiding a long dispute. Not flawless - the portal can be clunky and paperwork sometimes lags, so I knocked off a star - but if you want someone who actually gets brokers to commit, this team delivers.
Adella Labadie
Activity
Reviews
92 reviews · average 2.7
Four years managing a 25-truck fleet in the Midwest taught me to hate dead hours and paperwork that drags a load down. What sold me on Trucking42 was the instant alert system - set your equipment, radius and minimum rate, and the app pushes matching loads the moment they’re posted. I filled two unexpected afternoon gaps last month simply because the alert included rate per mile and a broker score, so I didn’t have to dig through listings. It isn’t perfect; I get duplicate notifications sometimes and a few low-ball lanes slip through, which is why I can’t give five stars. Still, those timely alerts have cut empty miles for us more than a few times, so it’s become a tool we actually rely on.
Bottom line: their support is the reason we won't renew. When a GPS integration broke in the middle of a busy week, support took three days to respond and then bounced the ticket between tiers; while drivers waited at docks we racked up detention fees. I've got a 25-truck fleet in the Midwest and the rep eventually promised a patch that never showed up - follow-ups were met with canned emails and no real escalation. Phone hold times are brutal, and when you do finally get someone the answers feel scripted and half-informed. The app can handle dispatching, but the customer service failures cost us time and money we can't keep absorbing.
Bottom line: not worth the cost - the subscription devoured margin without delivering the promised payoff. We signed up expecting faster dispatch and fewer headaches, but steep per-user fees plus an unexpected implementation charge ballooned our first quarter bill. I manage a 25-truck fleet in the Midwest and have four years running this operation, so the improvements never produced the ROI I needed. Support was painfully slow and they even billed for customization time, which added several thousand dollars to the tab. If you’re price-sensitive and need measurable savings quickly, this one left us short.
…and then it just stopped reporting when we needed it most. We run 25 trucks across the Midwest and a three-hour GPS blackout last month meant two missed pickups, a late delivery fee, and a DOT compliance alert - cost us close to a grand in one day. The live maps would freeze or show trucks parked when they were barreling down the highway; maintenance reminders vanished too, so one rig missed service and sat idle for a week. Support was slow and pushed firmware updates that made things worse instead of fixing anything. Won’t rely on this for time-sensitive runs again.
...went with GPS Insight after ditching our old provider, and it's a weird mix. The maintenance reminders actually beat the old system - they catch oil intervals and service windows without me babysitting a spreadsheet. But the dashboard and alert tuning is clunky; we run 25 trucks in the Midwest - been at this four years - and I still find myself digging through menus to silence idling alerts that our previous no-frills tracker handled with simple thresholds. When it clicks, route snapshots and vehicle history are clear and save time; when it doesn't, the notification noise creates more work than it fixes. Mixed feelings: better on maintenance and history, worse for day-to-day usability compared to the cheap system we replaced.
The first morning we rolled out units, three of five refused to pair with the vehicles and sat on 'no signal' for hours while drivers waited. The quick-start guide was vague and contradicted the hardware labeling, so our tech had to try three different harnesses before guessing the right one; live support finally replied after 26 hours with a checklist we'd already followed. With 25 trucks across the Midwest and four years managing fleets, I expected a faster setup that wouldn't tie up crews for two full days. Those delays meant missed pickups, overtime for our installer, and a few hundred dollars in avoidable costs. Once it's running the dashboard is fine, but getting started was needlessly painful - not a good fit if you need to deploy quickly.
The alerts system grabbed my attention from day one - and not entirely in a good way. Configuring geofence and speed-threshold alerts is impressively deep; you can chain conditions and set time windows, which finally let me stop chasing phantom speeding tickets. But it's also the reason I now suffer alert fatigue: we got hammered with repetitive notifications, sometimes duplicated across email, SMS and app, and the rules interface makes it awkward to suppress the noise without accidentally turning off something important. With 25 trucks across the Midwest and four years managing fleets, I can say it saved us once by catching extended idling that would’ve cost a service call, so it’s not worthless - just blunt until you spend hours fine-tuning. If you have the patience to test and tweak every scenario it pays off, but expect a messy learning curve at first.
Bottom line: the engine-diagnostics alerts are a lifesaver and a nuisance at the same time. They flagged a failing coolant sensor on Truck 12 last winter that almost certainly saved us from a roadside tow, so the value is real. But for every useful alert there are two noisy fault codes from flaky OBD-II sensors and the threshold settings are awkward to tailor by individual vehicle, which means dispatchers get alert fatigue and start muting notifications. After four years running a 25-truck operation in the Midwest I'm honestly torn - the diagnostic depth is the reason we stuck with Geotab, yet the constant false alarms cost us time and trust in the system. If they cleaned up per-vehicle tuning and cut duplicate alerts, this feature would be a game-changer; as it stands, it’s powerful but imperfect.
I've used Fleetio for four years. We run 25 trucks and the platform ended up costing us about $350 a month after the telematics and inventory add-ons were tacked on - roughly $4,000 a year - and I can't say it paid for itself. The core tracking worked okay, but those “optional” extras felt mandatory if you wanted a real picture of uptime, so the bill kept creeping higher. When a truck went down last winter it took days to get service history from support, by which point we’d already paid an outside shop to get the unit back on the road; that kind of downtime cost wiped out any theoretical savings. If your budget is tight and you need measurable ROI, this felt like paying for a promise more than for results.
Bottom line: the subscription paid for itself in under four months. What made me happy was the ETA accuracy - customers stopped calling dispatch every hour, which honestly felt like a miracle. I manage 25 trucks in the Midwest and after four years of juggling missed windows, reclaiming that dispatcher time translated directly into saved wages and less frantic coordination. The upfront onboarding felt pricey and the monthly bill made me wince, but the reduction in phone traffic and fewer delivery complaints more than covered the cost. If your main metric is cutting customer calls and getting predictable runs, this is worth the money.